Attenuate

By dictionary definition, to attenuate something is to reduce in force or effect. When talking about modular synthesis, although this holds true, it may help anyone confused to think of it as "turning down the volume", with two very strong caveats:

a) It doesn't apply only to audio signals, and b) Attenuation only reduces, never amplifies.

I only feel it is really necessary to explain this to avoid some confusions that may occur when trying to picture attenuation of a signal because when attenuated a signal is reduced in scale - e.g if a cv is attenuated by 50%, a 10V cv would become a 5V cv, and a 3V cv would become a 1.5V cv. i.e. everything is reduced to scale, by an amount dictated by the attenuator, so you will still get the same dynamic variation within a range closer to zero.

Attenuation is a very valuable, nay essential, tool in modular synthesis since it allows signals from one module to be fed to another whether audio or cv, without overdriving, clipping or 'over-reaching'* an input. nearly all the knobs on a module that are labelled something like "input level", "output level", "cv amount" etc. are just built in attenuators, but, not all modules have attenuators on all inputs/outputs, and some modules cant cope with the full signal output by one or more modules being fed in, hence external attenuation may be necessary.


 * (by over-reaching, in this case is meant to apply so much cv from either a single or multiple sources combined that the result is a module is always receiving the maximum cv it can cope with, and hence no effect will be percieved, e.g. feeding too much cv into a filter cutoff input could result in it remaining fully open all the time).